If you haven't used Grunt before, be sure to check out the Getting Started guide, as it explains how to create a Gruntfile as well as install and use Grunt plugins. Once you're familiar with that process, you may install this plugin with this command:

npm install grunt-release-branch --save-dev

Once the plugin has been installed, it may be enabled inside your Gruntfile with this line of JavaScript:

When developing for the web, we usually have a bunch of build steps which take care of concatenation, minification, inlining templates, generating html snapshots and so on and so on...

After running through all those steps, the final output is usually placed into an output directory that is not commited into version control. Following the release branch pattern we take this output and place it on an orphan branch, where another mechanism can kick in and e.g. publish it as a website. That's exactly how it works with github when using a gh-pages branch.

This grunt plugin consits of two tasks to assist you for those scenarios.

This task should run before all other build steps. It simply does git branch -D gh-pages and git checkout -b gh-pages under the covers. Please note that the branch name can be configured with the releaseBranch option.

This task should run as the last command in your build orchestration. It moves all the files from your output directory to the root level of your working directory while deleting all other stuff except your .git folder. It than optionally commits and pushs using the --force parameter.